Wednesday, November 09, 2011

Making A Bit Of Progress: Beautiful Butterflies FLY Artwork

Today's Lesson From The Craft Room: A Bird Does Not Sing Because It Has An Answer. It Sings Because It Has A Song. -Chinese Proverb

I have been working on a number of mixed media collages for sometime now. The one that drew me to this quote is not ready for sharing yet...or maybe it is...it is definitely a work in progress! Maybe I'll give you a peek a bit later in the week. It began with images of blue jays and has evolved, quite slowly I might add, from there. Today I decided to pull the piece back out and continue working on it and I felt it needed some words. So I started looking for quotes about birds and came upon this perfect proverb. It was exactly the message I needed to hear. Why do we create art? Not because we have answers or feel like we are creating the perfect piece. We create art because we have a song to sing. There are notes inside of us that need to be expressed. And so we sing.
I did feel like I made enough progress today on this piece from last week that I decided to share it with you today! Doris, if you're reading this, I'll be curious about your thoughts on where I'm taking this :) Let me share with you how I've gotten this far. It began on my birthday on Oct. 21st! A friend gave me a gift and the gift was wrapped in beautiful tissue paper. Once I started working on this piece, I knew the tissue paper had to be incorporated in some way. So, I took the tissue paper and adhered it to a canvas board using matte medium. Here is what it looked like after that step was complete:

I decided the pattern was a bit too bold and that it would overshadow the piece I had made, so I took a risk and coated the entire panel with white gesso. Gesso is great since it is more transparent than opaque. Here is the panel coated with gesso:

And can you see what else I added???? If you look closely, you will notice that I used the Mostly Vintage stencil to create texture on the panel! How did I do it? I held the stencil down and then covered it with flexible modeling paste. I applied the paste over the stencil using an old hotel room key (very much like using an old credit card) and then lifted the stencil. I LOVE how you can use stencils for different mediums - not just ink! I then let the paste dry and started to play around with where I might position the original piece on the canvas. I started with trying it here:

As I was playing around with the placement I decided that the piece needed more color. So I began creating washes of color - blues and greens - using watercolor crayons and a brush. Which leaves me with the piece exactly as you see at the top of this post (I have not adhered the original piece down onto the canvas yet - I seem to like it placed more to the left than to the right...but who knows how I'll feel tomorrow!). I'm not sure where the piece will go next. I need to sit with it for awhile. I feel like some sparkle is going to get added to the panel...we'll see. I'll be sure to let you know where I go next!

1 comment:

That is my favorite quote and it's so true when you apply it to creativity. Your collage is coming out beautifully. I was wondering in the first picture if you had used some kind of texture paint and you answered that question. I really like the addition of the colors too.